K Street struggles to decode Trump VP pick Vance

In just two short years, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) went from winning a seat in the Senate in 2022 to securing his spot as former President Trump’s vice presidential pick last week. 

His meteoric rise leaves few clues for lobbyists looking to decode the junior senator’s policy positions and little footing to make inroads with a potential second Trump White House. 

A former senior White House official told The Hill that the decision to tap Vance “is likely a shocking pick to the D.C. establishment who were rooting for a more conventional VP pick.” 

Given Vance’s relatively short tenure in Congress, his former staffers haven’t made their way in droves down the well-trodden path from Capitol Hill to K Street, the term referring to the Washington influence industry that has spread far beyond the street for which it is named. 

Vance has also raised eyebrows with some of his initial moves on Capitol Hill, including co-sponsoring legislation with progressive Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) to claw back compensation from executives whose banks fail and introducing a bill in May that would bar public health officials from working with drug, biologic and medical device companies after leaving office for eight years, among other provisions. 

He has also called the merger-busting Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan “one of the few people in the Biden administration that I think is doing a pretty good job” and signed on to co-sponsor the Credit Card Competition Act, a bipartisan bill that financial institutions have been spending millions to fight. 

“Those are not business-as-usual-type arrangements,” Loren Monroe, a principal at the lobbying giant BGR Group, told The Hill.  

“We’re telling our clients that the traditional alliances and divisions of issues by party are being scrambled and political and policy engagement has to be more nimble and retrofitted to accommodate these changing political priorities,” Monroe added. 

While Trump’s decision to pick Vance also “shocked” many CEOs, according to Semafor, the decision did not come as a surprise to some lobbyists.  

“The conventional wisdom of the Bush Era has been irrelevant for a long, long time. A lot of Republican D.C.-based lobbyists and consultants are less comfortable with the party’s effort to appeal to working-class voters, and I think in part that’s why Nikki Haley won the D.C. primary against Trump,” Sam Geduldig, co-CEO of CGCN Group and a former staffer for the House Financial Services Committee and Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), told The Hill. 

David French, chief lobbyist at the National Retail Federation (NRF), praised Vance as a “disruptor” willing to take a fresh look at lingering issues, pointing to the Credit Card Competition Act as a bill that aims to break up the “Visa-Mastercard duopoly” by requiring large financial issuers to offer more than two network options for processing credit card transactions.

The NRF plans to recognize Vance this week at its annual retail summit as one of 16 “Champions of Main Street” who demonstrate “consistent support of the retail industry’s public policy priorities,” alongside the bill’s primary sponsors Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Roger Marshall (R-Kan.). 

A spokesperson for the Electronic Payments Coalition, a coalition of banks including Visa and Mastercard opposing the bill, did not return a request to discuss Vance’s decision to sign on as a co-sponsor. 

Doug Kantor, general counsel at the National Association of Convenience Stores who is also highly engaged on the Credit Card Competition Act, told The Hill that the senator and his staff “have always been fantastic to work with.” 

“It is not helpful for people to go in [to Vance’s office] and sling a bunch of BS. They need to know what they’re talking about,” Kantor said. 

Vance grew up in a Rust Belt town in Ohio and wrote about the poverty, isolation and addiction he witnessed in his communities in his memoir-turned-movie “Hillbilly Elegy.” But he also spent a brief stint as a venture capitalist and has maintained close ties in Silicon Valley.

He joined Peter Thiel’s venture capital firm Mithril Capital in 2015 after graduating from Yale Law School. 

Vance later joined the D.C.-based investment firm Revolution before founding his own Ohio-based venture capital firm, Narya Capital, with backing from Thiel, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. 

Thiel also poured $15 million into a super PAC supporting the Vance campaign during the 2022 election cycle.

But not everyone has been on board for Vance. Former Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) backed former Ohio Republican Party Chair Jane Timken to succeed him during the 2022 election cycle, while Trump backed Vance, who went on to beat out a crowded field of contenders. 

Geduldig was one of Vance’s early donors, giving his campaign $2,900 in June 2022, a few weeks after he won his Ohio primary because, he told The Hill, he admires Vance’s “commitment to working-class issues.” His firm’s CGCN PAC also gave $2,900 to Ohioans for JD in May 2022 and $2,400 to the Vance Victory a few months later in August, according to Federal Election Commission records, and Geduldig wrote another check to the Vance campaign last month.

“We view our job as to get to know and have relationships with elected officials, period,” Geduldig said, adding, “we think we are well-positioned with the people that are winning Republican primaries and elections.”

Spokespeople for Vance did not respond to The Hill’s question about Vance’s approach to lobbyists who may have bet against him in the past. But at the top of the ticket, Trump warned in January that donors to Nikki Haley will be “permanently barred from the MAGA camp.”  

“Here in town, it will absolutely suck for people who have written [Vance] off for the past 3 years, going back to his [Ohio] campaign,” the former White House official warned. 

Julia Shapero contributed.